A short film (approx 15 mins.) about the Voyager missions to the outer planets. These two spacecraft, launched in the 1970s, are still sending back data, and are now about 14 light-hours from earth, starward bound. The video includes a mix of actual Viking imagery, and artist’s conceptions, and music and photos that were included as part of the Viking craft, etched into a gold-plated record
This 13-minute video shows every nuclear test, starting from the Trinity Test in July 1945. Details are provided at the link.
The Mars Rover has been on the ground for over a decade. Here is a time lapse video which shows all of its wanderings, in eight minutes.
Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry.
“Just as in her narrative, the ordinary is lifted into the extraordinary; score, writing, band and voice come together to create a package that never makes you question why you aren’t just reading or listening to this. That’s because Tempest, fierce and shy in the same moment, is such a genuinely galvanising presence and acutely responsive to her audience. It matters that we are there; it matters that these stories are told. It matters that we listen.” from the Guardian review by Lyn Gardner.
Part 1 is the performance piece I would like you to watch. (The other parts of the poem are less relevant to the course, and somewhat violent in nature.)
Also by Kate Tempest, check out Icarus
This short video was featured as the Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 8, 2014, where you can find more information. The film is comprised of a series of visualizations of what it might be like for humans to wander the solar system. All the background features are accurate artist’s renderings of what we know about the planets and moons of the outer solar system. The imagination of the film maker inserts the humans, and the narration is Carl Sagan.
The ‘Black marble’ video shows composite images of the Earth at night:
A classic pastiche of a tech briefing. Pre-Star Trek technobabble.
For more, see the wikipedia entry.
Here is a NASA application called Eyes on Exoplanets that allows you to explore the exoplanet database, including all the Kepler discoveries. (Requires a download and install to run.)
Here is a beautiful visual summary by astrophysicist Alex Parker of over 2,000 high-quality planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, visualized as if they are orbiting a common parent star. This gives you a sense of the wide diversity in size and orbital characteristics.
Painted Stone, a piece by composer/astrophysicist Alex Parker. This shows 100,000 asteroids identified by the Sloan Digital Sky survey. (In Fall 2016, the number is now up to 200,000.) The so-called Trojan asteroids that lead, and lag, Jupiter by 60 degrees on its orbit are clearly visible once you get to see the whole collection of objects.
Why is this important? The asteroids might be a source of resources, and a way to fuel our exploration of space. Here’s a short video by the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to commercialize asteroid mining. (No endorsement is implied here. The following is just a good short video explaining the ‘why’ of asteroid mining.)
“To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.” — Richard Feynman
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) argued that if the void existed, every object would fall through the void at the same unlimited speed, because there would be nothing to hinder its motion. Therefore, Aristotle concluded, the concept of the void is absurd. This was one of several arguments he gave for its nonexistence. Over eight centuries later, John Philoponus (Approx 490-570 CE) thought otherwise. He lived over a thousand years before Galileo, and his works of critical commentary on Aristotle’s physics were largely forgotten for many centuries.
So, what actually happens when you drop a feather and a bowling ball in vacuum? Here is a full-scale demonstration, carried out in the world’s largest vacuum chamber:
An earlier demonstration was carried out on the Moon using a hammer and a feather by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott: